5 Tips To Make Learning To Read Easier

Just learning to read is not enough if your child is going to compete in the modern information society. Becoming a good or excellent reader is the key to your child's future.

A young enthusiastic reader will get through 2-3 books every week. That might be 1000% more than your child is reading. And so a huge differential will open up.

So here are 5 things that will make a huge difference to your child's reading development. We employ all of them in our Easyread System:

TIP 1 - Don't Use Books

I know that most children learn to read with books, but most also never become good readers, let alone excellent readers. Almost any child can become a good reader and there are simple reasons why they don't.

A bright child will look at the text and use the easiest approach, which is to memorise some words and guess the others. That seems to work OK at first, but leads to more and more guessing as the books get more complicated.

Eventually you will see a collapse of confidence at around 6 or 7 years old.

TIP 2 - "Dimensionalise" the Phonemes

We use 43 phonemes (the little sounds within words) to create every word in English. You can find them at the beginning of any dictionary. Your child needs to know them, to make learning to read easier.

But phonemes are non-physical, abstract objects and very hard for your child to remember. So what we do is create strong visual characters to represent each one. For instance, for the sounds of the letter A we have the ants in pink pants, the ape in a cape and the ark in the park. Those are things your child can visualise and so remember.

The brain stores most memories in a visual form.

TIP 3 - Play These Games

So what should you use rather than a book?

Try these games, that work very well for us:

Build-A-Word. Get hold of some plastic letters and select 4 consonants and 2 vowels. Go over the sound of each one. Then say a simple and regular 3 letter word for your child to build with them (like mat, ten, fin or hit).

Select-A-Word. On a piece of paper, write three similar words, like hot, hat, pat. Read one of them out loud and ask your child to select which word it is.